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الأحد، 9 فبراير 2014

How Facebook Is Destroying History - A Survey Of August 21st

How Facebook Is Destroying History - A Survey Of August 21st

Brown Moses Blog

This week, as Facebook celebrated it's tenth birthday, an article in The Atlantic
highlighted another aspect of the Syrian conflict taking place on the
pages of Facebook. Many of us who study open source information
relating to the conflict, such as YouTube and Facebook, frequently come
across dead links to Facebook pages belonging to opposition groups and
pro-government groups. The Atlantic article points towards the deletion
of opposition Facebook pages as being part of online campaigns run by
pro-government groups

"We continue our reporting attacks," read a typical post from December 9
on the SEA�s Facebook page. "Our next target is the Local Coordination
Committee of Barzeh [a neighborhood in Damascus], the page that is a
partner in shedding Syrian blood and provoking sectarian division." It
then provided two links to photos on the Barzeh page that could get the
page taken down. Soon afterwards, the SEA removed its post as if it had
never existed.

These deletions mean a vast amount of information is being lost,
including initial reports of various events, photographs, and videos.
But how do we get a sense of how much information is being lost?

In recent weeks, I've been working on a project to gather and analyse
all the information I can find relating to the August 21st Sarin attacks
in Damascus. This has included collecting a list of YouTube channels
posting videos relating to the attacks, many of which have Facebook
pages linked in the video descriptions. To understand how much
information is being lost, I've reviewed each channel, and detailed the
status of their related Facebook pages below.

9 channels have no Facebook links. 7 are linked to Facebook pages that
are now gone (some of which have new replacement pages created after
August 21st), with 2 linked to existing Facebook pages. That means 78%
of Facebook pages that could have included initial report about the
August 21st attack, and relevant photographs and videos, are gone.
Compared to the hundreds, if not thousands, of YouTube pages linked to
Facebook pages, this is a small sample size, but relating to the one
event that took place on August 21st, this represents a extremely
significant amount of information.

The question for Facebook is how they see their role in the world.
Social media is being used as a place for both sides in the Syrian
conflict to get their message out, and sometimes that includes unique
and important information. This has lead to an online information war,
with both sides attempting to eliminate each other from the internet,
with data on war crimes and key events in the conflict being
the collateral damage, if not the intended target. Facebook has a
choice, develop it's policies to take into account the changing way in
which online communities and social media are being used in relation to
conflicts, or to be just another place where people can share pictures
of their latest meal and funny cat pictures.